This was a very bad week for the White House.
I don't care how you score this one, you can't have a Supreme Court nominee being chased from the high court by the president's own political party before she ever gets a hearing, to be followed by a criminal indictment of a presidential assistant and Vice President Dick Cheney's right-hand man for obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury, and not come to the conclusion that you have lived through a real-life nightmare.
I don't know what everyone else was doing Friday morning -- I suspect they were working -- but the press conference given by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was an outstanding example of what the criminal justice system in this country is supposed to be about.
Rather than the "leaking-like-a-sieve" investigation by the now infamous Ken Starr during the dark days of the Clinton administration, the absolutely no-leak conduct of the investigation into who played God with this country's national security conducted by Fitzgerald is the kind of story that needs to be told and retold in every classroom in America.
Fitzgerald took every question asked during the press conference and answered every question that he could in a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense way that led the viewer to believe that here is a man who understands the law and pays tribute to its majesty by the way he and those associated with him have conducted their professional lives. If ever there were a primer to be shown to the citizens of this country who may have lost their faith in our system of justice, the tape of Fitzgerald's press conference fills the bill.
I don't take any great delight in the indictment of any person who has given so much of himself to public service as Lewis "Scooter" Libby has done. But I do believe that people eventually pay for their arrogance -- especially when their attitude at the helm of public office has a price attached that can be measured in people's lives and a misery quotient that need not have been raised but for that arrogance.
By that I mean that I have always believed the biggest fault of the Bush administration has been a group of people who believe -- without good reason to believe -- that theirs is the only way, to the point of distraction and at a cost that need not have been paid by the people who had entrusted the reins of government to them.
Fitzgerald was very careful to discuss only that which was contained in the five-count indictment against Libby. What he didn't say was what could happen if Libby is inclined to discuss truthfully what really took place and why he obstructed the course of the grand jury investigation.
If the allegations in the indictment are true -- and Libby is entitled fully to the presumption of innocence -- then what Libby did had to be at the suggestion of others or part of a larger scheme to discredit a man who was questioning the key element to President Bush's reasoning for going to war in Iraq.
We all know today that the president's insistence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or was close to having them -- and that we couldn't wait for the mushroom cloud to prove his case -- was, in fact, untrue. Had Ambassador Joseph Wilson's claims of administration exaggeration been allowed to get traction, rather than being beaten down by the White House attack machine, who knows if this country would have been so quick to authorize the war.
We all know today that there is no alternative to winning in Iraq, but had Wilson not been sullied by the Bushies in their attempt to silence opposition, who knows the alternatives to war and its 2,000 American dead that might have been available.
In the end, while these indictments are about obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury, they have as their genesis an attempt to control American public opinion in the buildup to what has become a very costly war -- in people, in money and in international credibility. No matter how one feels about Bush and his efforts to keep us safe and make us safer, no American should be too quick to cede the truth in matters of such grave importance.
As for the other part of the president's bad week, I saw Harriet Miers get on Marine One with Bush after his brief statement following the Libby indictment. No one in the White House can or should be too happy with the fact that a woman who Bush believed would do his bidding on the Supreme Court -- which, presumably, was the fulfillment of the desires and dreams of the evangelical right wing of the Republican Party (goodbye Roe v. Wade) -- got sacked before she ever had a chance to plead her case. Those hypocrites in the U.S. Senate should look up the word consistency, just for fun.
So now we have a politically wounded president, trying to mend those wounds with the right-wing supporters who will insist on a justice the rest of the country will despise, and also trying to carry on with business as usual, not knowing if and when the other shoe will drop from the special prosecutor. That could lead to at least one more bad week.
But, as we all know, presidents have good weeks and they have bad weeks and, then, they have good weeks again. No reason to believe that won't happen here. Unless Bush refuses to learn from this really bad week he has just endured. In that event, who knows what will happen?
But if you want to hazard a guess, consider that when he and Miers jumped aboard Marine One, that helicopter took off for Camp David -- also known as the presidential retreat.
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